by Frank Calvillo
With the release of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, featuring an all-star ensemble led by Matt Damon, Hollywood’s unofficial space trilogy, which also includes Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, becomes complete. The two and a half hour film features the best of Gravity’s compelling manic isolation and enough of Interstellar’s involving sentimentality, while managing to establish itself as one of the most entertaining and original sci-fi films of all time.
In The Martian, Damon plays Mark Watney, a member of a NASA space team headed by Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain), stationed on Mars. When the team needs to make a sudden evacuation and Watney disappears in a sand storm, Lewis makes the difficult command decision to leave immediately for the safety of the rest of her crew.
Mark eventually comes to alive, but injured and with barely any oxygen left in his tank. After assessing his prospects back at the crew’s Mars base camp, he decides to use whatever elements he has around him to survive as long as he can on the planet while simultaneously documenting his experiences via camera. When NASA and the rest of his team discover that Mark is in fact alive, it becomes a pulsating race against time to go back and rescue him before his resources completely run out.
Hybrid films are perhaps some of the most difficult to pull off, mainly because it’s somewhat tricky to make various kinds of tones work in synch with each other. Fortunately, Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard have made a film which brilliantly works as three different genres.
First and foremost, The Martian has enough of sci-fi thrills to rival some of the best space movies of all-time. There’s great suspense to be had at watching the scientists over at NASA try, fail, and try again to devise various ways of bringing Mark home before he perishes. When a plan finally does work involving Mark’s own team, there are still a number of nail-biting moments as to whether or not it will actually come off. Second, there’s plenty of emotional heart in the scenes featuring Mark coping to survive against elements that, by all accounts, should have ended him. Despite every setback he is faced with, Mark’s spirit endures as does the audience’s investment in him and his fight to make it back home. Last, though its loaded with plenty of sci-fi and drama, The Martian also manages to be a surprisingly funny film with the majority of the laughs coming from Mark’s own goofball antics, which come as a result of one of the most memorable forms of cabin fever ever shown on screen.
In many ways, The Martian is a reminder of just how skilled a director Ridley Scott is by the way he is able to balance the multi-toned film. Even more impressive is how the director is able to hold the audience’s attention when it leaves Mark on Mars and focuses on other characters. Scenes featuring NASA’s seemingly impossible task of rescuing Mark are made all the more compelling thanks to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s devoted scientist, Jeff Daniels’ no-nonsense NASA head, and Kristen Wiig’s tightly-wound publicist. Likewise, scenes of Mark’s own team (which also includes Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, and Aksel Hennie) learning about his being alive and questioning whether or not to defy NASA’s orders and return to Mars to save him provides enough of an interesting narrative for its own movie.
Damon couldn’t have asked for a better role at this point in his career, and he knows it. Mark is the kind of depth-filled character any actor would kill to play simply because of the various ranges attached. Wisely, Damon never lets Watney get overly emotional. Instead, the actor plays him as a man needing to stay strong and not lose control for the sake of his own sanity. It was a brilliant move on the actor’s part and one which made all the difference in the world.
Though its his show, Damon is more than ably supported by a strong ensemble cast with a few notable standouts. Chastain brings great strength and humanity to her role as Lewis, as does Ejiofor as a top NASA boss. Daniels turns in a performance full of tough steeliness like nothing he’s done before as does Wiig, alternating her character between nervous and skeptical.
If you look at most American films that have come out since the beginning of time dealing with obstacles and perseverance, they tend to go one of two ways. Either the film will be about the strength of the individual succeeding in spite of insurmountable odds, or it will be about the power of teamwork and cooperation achieving the impossible. For all its positives in terms of story and performances, what makes The Martian one of the most unique films of its kind, is how it manages to show the unshakeable force of both.